Recently Dakshin Chitra hosted a Lampwork workshop by the famous Glass artist Mr. Srinivasa Raghavan and I somehow fought with my schedule to find time to take up a class. I had seen his demos atleast thrice in the past and he works with glass as though it was clay. Sorry strike that, I find it very hard to work with clay so the correct comparison would be to fabric.
For the last one year or so trends indicate that jewellers are starting to make their own components but going beyond metal and wire to work with either ceramics or glass. I was really hoping that this year I would somehow contact a ceramic artist and maybe develop some pedants or focals or I didnt think that I could learn to work with glass. The 11/2 day session with Mr..Raghavan changed my perspective.
He did demos of simple objects which he thought we could replicate and then went on to wow us with his sea horses and swans. Once we got over the the initial fear (of handling molten glass and staring into fire) glass was pretty fun to work with. It will bubble and flow like water. Ofcourse what was simple to him was hard for us, so we all abandoned the idea of replicating his designs and just tried to work with glass organically producing whatever shapes we fancied.
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| Pieces created by Mr. Raghavan |
Our Instructor was a glass sculptor so he wanted us to try focals or minis without mandrels or presses rather than beads but on my request he showed us how to make a flat disc bead.
Take a look at this demo video, where he makes a couple of glass disc beads in seconds. He makes it look so easy, but believe me, it isn’t. As he says, It is in the cooling as much as the heating something that we will understand only after years of practise.
We did focals with borosilicate glass tubes rather than beads and trying to make the loop was the hardest part, as it would break while turning or we would mush up the focal by over heating it. The most frustrating part of the whole process is seeing your pieces fall off the table and break as you are gathering them. After working with (read staring into) fire for a session (which was 15-20 minutes), It was difficult to see anything and people looked as though they had giant blobs of red and yellow colors on their faces. All of us were literally in tears with watery eyes and had throbbing headaches. I then realised how hard my dad has worked his entire life. Being an electrode and welding developer and engineer he has supervised welding all his life and even does so now at 65 something that is possible only when you are passionate about what you do.
Here are some of my creations. I sincerely hope that my lampworking friends and artists who read this blog arent offended by my crude attempts. Its not possible to even understand the medium in 2 days but it was an opportunity to learn about the effort that went into creating glass beads or components. Please pardon my bad photography, I am running on a crazy schedule here and this is all I could manage.
Day 1 of Lampwork Experiments
Day 2 of Lampwork Experiments
I tried a leaf, tendril,flowers – color inclusion and focal with initials – D on one side for Divya and S on the other for Sayuri. The Last one is a Roman tendril inspired bohemian piece and it still needs a lot of work.
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